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alphadogg writes "Ed Iacobucci, whose work on OS/2 at IBM helped fuel the PC craze and whose efforts at Citrix and VirtualWorks aimed to bring computing back under control, has died at the age of 59 from pancreatic cancer. Born in Argentina and schooled in systems engineering at Georgia Tech, Iacobucci got his career start in 1979 at IBM, where he held architecture and design leadership roles involving PC operating systems OS/2 and DOS, working closely with Microsoft in doing so (and later turned down a job there). Iacobucci left 10 years later to start thin-client/virtualization company Citrix, followed by creation of on-demand jet company DayJet, and most recently VirtualWorks, a company dedicated to managing big data sprawl. He stepped down as CEO of VirtualWorks in May because of his health."

A REAL SHILL is frankly as easy to spot as a goth kid in a bible camp, that is because corporate makes them "stay on message" so it never fails you end up with "buzzword bingo" that no normal human actually uses in a day to day conversation. we have seen such gems as "vertical synergy" "enhanced user experience" and so on and so forth. Seriously guys they are REALLY not hard to spot, a real shill is as subtle as old Twitter was when it came t

Citrix didn't get screwed and neither did OS/2, in fact I'd say we'd be using OS/2 right now if it had been put out by any other company than IBM.

I know many will say OS/2 was done in by the "big bad M$" but in reality it actually fits well with my theory that every major success at MSFT is preceded by "And then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" only in the case of OS/2 it wasn't one really dumb thing, it was TWO really REALLY dumb things that did it in.

I didn't mention it in my blog post, but yes Citrix was a major victim of the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco. It is hardly the worse of it though. Look up "OS/2 Microsoft Munchkins", and remember that wasn't the only unethical attack MS tried against OS/2 later on, which got worse as Chicago (Windows 95) was delayed. Not to mention DR-DOS too (remember OS/2 never depended on DOS).

Team OS/2 went external that spring, when the first Team OS/2 Party was held in Chicago. The IBM Marketing Office in Chicago created a huge banner visible from the streets. Microsoft reacted when Steve Ballmer roamed the floor with an application on diskette that had been specially programmed to crash OS/2; and OS/2 enthusiasts gathered for an evening of excitement at the first Team OS/2 party.

Well, I've met Liddy, sat with him and Tim Leary over a couple of pitchers (Lizard's Underground, East Lansing, ~1982). He talks just fine, or did, back then. As for Ballmer? I dunno, never met him. Don't care much for what I see of him, tho.

Bah. I hate history when retold by those who lost. MS battled against OS/2 and won, yes, but unethical? No. MS just had the resources and will to play dirty, and evidently IBM did not. That's just modern business and honestly I think most companies nowadays, whether they be MS, Apple or the open-source fan's champion Google, would do exactly the same "unethical" actions necessary to win against the competition.

MS was unethical because they were paid to develop OS/2 in the first place and used that position to, against the terms of the agreement they signed, copy the best features into their own OS AND to write the original OS/2 so as to make it work less well than it could have.

That being said, ultimately the failure of OS/2 resulted from IBM's original attempt to keep PCs from advancing beyond the 80286 chip. While they abandoned that position, it left them with a major PR hurdle that they were never able to o

See, I can accept that. At least you see OS/2's failure as being more than just due to Microsoft's actions. Same thing with Internet Explorer vs Netscape really. People say MS muscled Netscape out with IE being free and bundled with new computers/Windows. But by the time IE 4 came around it WAS better (in performance at least) compared to Netscape Communicator at the time. Heck, I use Firefox now but I distinctly remember using IE by choice because of how much better it was at the time. Netscape just didn't

That was the the thing with Microsoft, they could have behaved fairly ethically and between IBM shooting themselves and the luck of ram prices staying high they would have won the desktop but they still behaved very unethically.With IE vs Netscape, Microsoft making IE free meant that Netscape couldn't sell their browser and with no income coming in they obviously couldn't compete and fell behind the company that could afford to spend lots of money on a freebie.

Bullshit, as somebody in the trenches MSFT didn't do anything but capitalize on some seriously DUMB SHIT moves by IBM.

IBM tried to fuck the OEMs over with MCA bus and then followed that with crazy prices for copies of OS/2 to try to force themselves back into the market leader position, the OEMs rightly looked at OS/2 like an STD and stayed the hell away from it. Intel refused to allow second sources for 386 and later (which is why Intel and AMD ended up in court and why the AMD 386 and 486 didn't come out

Let's hope this starts the downfall of all Centralised Desktop Terror Computing (CDTC, t/m); too many people have been forced into utter frustration and unproductiveness for far too long already by SuckTricks and like products.

It's great for what it is. The healthcare industry uses it heavily because 1) it's cheaper to deploy a thousand thin clients than a thousand Dell boxxen 2) the thin clients are more likely to fit into a cramped nurses' station, and 3) running the application remotely means no PHI is sitting on a public-facing terminal, and 4) it's easier to manage and update a handful of Citrix servers.

But, the man's dead, and you're posting shit like "SuckTricks." If you're the age your UID implies and that's the full ex

Aha, a karma whore. Well, I might be mentally retarded in your view, but that mostly just gives good insight on your own mental capacities...You are probably too young and unexperienced to have seen the fallout of the first ten years of centralised computing on Windows platforms, it was hell, outright hell.Properly implemented centralised computing can be good for a few scenarios, like the one you mentioned. Problem is that Citrix has taken around 10 years to come anywhere close to maturity, but has been

Oh yes it did. I'm guessing you're just too young to remember. Thanks to massive os/2 tv campaigns, "normal" people suddenly wanted a computer, not just a console to play games on

Perhaps you are thinking of PS/2, the computer, a followup to the IBM PC?

OS/2 was an operating system and few people used its 16-bit 1.x incarnation. Microsoft was IBM's partner is OS/2 development. Microsoft tried to get people to move from MS-DOS to OS/2 1.x and failed. They then thought what the hell lets deliver that OS/2 1.x Presentation Manager GUI as a layer on top of MS-DOS. We'll call it MS Windows. OK, that was a little simplified yet basically accurate.

MS Windows was meant to be a stop gap, something temporary until users could be migrated to OS/2 from MS-DOS. Microsoft touted how compatible the APIs were, how easy it would be to port your Windows code to OS/2. It actually kind of was. However MS Windows really took off in popularity and MS rethought things, thought they might go it alone. IBM was working on the 32-bit Intel specific OS/2 2.0 and in parallel MS was working on the cross platforms successor version of OS/2, OS/2 NT. OS/2 NT got renamed Windows NT when MS and IBM "divorced".

OS/2 2.0 shipped, did a little better than 1.x but still it was a very minor player. MS successfully FUD'd OS/2 2.0 and got most users to wait just a little bit longer for Windows 95. Failing to deliver OS/2 development tools helped as well, delaying the availability of native apps.

So, no. No matter how many OS/2 TV commercials IBM ran it did not drive many people to OS/2.

My employer at the time had Windows and Macintosh versions of our app. We considered an OS/2 2.0 port. However the Windows version ran so damn well on OS/2 that there was really no point. Even a few customers who were interested in an OS/2 version conceded that and understood.

OS/2 2.0 and OS/2 3.0 were being developed side-by-side before the MS/IBM split, with 2.0 remaining 16-bit while 3.0 being a full 32-bit OS (remember that there was a 16-bit protected mode available starting with the 80286, which is what OS/2 2.0 used)

A key factor that younger people dont realize and many older people don't know is that IBM always viewed OS/2 as a way to sell hardware. It was named OS/2 because it was meant for IBM's PS/2 hardwar

Except for the fact that OS/2 2.0 was still 16-bit, sure.
OS/2 2.0 and OS/2 3.0 were being developed side-by-side before the MS/IBM split, with 2.0 remaining 16-bit while 3.0 being a full 32-bit OS (remember that there was a 16-bit protected mode available starting with the 80286, which is what OS/2 2.0 used)

Parts of the internal graphics engine were 16-bit, some drivers, and it did after all have full 16-bit Windows support. The graphics engine was 32-bit by OS/2 2.1. 16-bit code was temporary, just something to let them ship earlier, something fixed in an update, it was not inherently part of the design as in the Win 9x case. In any case this was irrelevant to the programmer. From the programmer's and user's perspective it was a 32-bit OS. Multitasking, multithreading, memory protections were are using 386 fu

For instance they originally wanted OS/2 2.0 to only support their proprietary PS/2 ports, and they also didnt want it to support EGA or VGA graphics (PS/2' hardware didnt support EGA or VGA graphics, instead they only supported Monochrome, CGA, and IBM's proprietary MCGA.)

IBM doesn't care about hardware sales, they've sold the desktop business to Lonovo and were recently shopping the server unit as well. IBM is and always has been a services company, they used hardware as a way to do it from the beginning but now most of the engagements come from software. These days hardware is just a way to sell software which sells services.

Ah, the memories... OS/2. It had a lot of great features, but it was a PITA to install, and they spent too much time trying to get it to run windows programs and not enough smoothing out some of the rough edges. I did prefer it to Win 3.11 at the time, though. IBM's WebExplorer become the first web browser I ever used. I still prefer the mutli-document interface from their NR/2 newsreader to anything I've used since. It also had the first multiboot launcher I've used, Boot Manager, which I had running

Still doesn't work with disks bigger then 2 TB (and OS/2 needs special partitioning to see over 500 GB) and doesn't work with Win 7s default of using 2 primaries.Bootmanager showed the difference in philosophies between MS and IBM. IBM made inter-operation easy while MS did every thing they could to lock you in.

This was a serious problem, and IBM knew it. I had a talk about this with Paul Giangarra, who was later the chief architect of OS/2. The OS/2 service group had to get volunteers from other IBM organizations to work their RETAIN queues; their customer support system. The normal crew was totally overwhelmed.

Paul told me that one customer called, and said that he dropped the diskettes, and they were now out of order, and did not know what to do. During that conversation, someone came into the office and t

>>and they spent too much time trying to get it to run windows programs

Who did?

I worked on the Windows Libraries for OS/2 (WLO) and it was a pure Microsoft effort, and it worked just fine thank you very much - in fact, thanks to some of the features we could take advantage of, like PM's graphics paths, we could out perform Win 3.1 too.

And higher machine specs, sure today you laugh at it but as I remember OS/2 required double as much RAM as Windows 3.1 to run well (I think 4MB and 8MB, but don't quote me on that), I used both but for the time the OS stole way too many resources on boot. This was still a time where if you ran anything "demanding" it usually ran barebones in DOS and fiddling with XMS, EMS to give it more than 1MB of memory. Not to mention OS/2 was the personification of the "unpersonal" office computer in a time where we we

It was IBMs bad luck that ram prices stayed so high as it did really need 8MB. I ran it in 4MBs by not loading the WPS and it worked very well. It was easier to run those DOS apps that needed more then 1MB of memory and due to a better file system, they ran faster.Warp V3 shipped with DIVE and DART for game support, Microsoft copied the idea and called it DirectX. IBM was interested in supporting games for a while.

When I first was using OS/2 (v3), I didn't use the WPS, instead using alternate shells such as filebar or mdesk and it was fine with 4 MBs. Now I have a Gigabyte of ram and yesterday it crashed with a swap file is full error, actually the swap file can only grow to 2 GBs which was huge in 1990.

Microsoft never had any intention of migrating people to OS/2 because IBM controlled the IP rights to OS/2 in a way that they did not with DOS. From the beginning Windows was intended to compete with OS/2. There were two sides to the story of what led to the break up between MS and IBM. On one hand, IBM insisted that the first version of OS/2 be written so as to limit its ability to be ported beyond the 80286 (I believe there were a few other strategic decisions made by IBM in the development of OS/2 that M

Microsoft never had any intention of migrating people to OS/2 because IBM controlled the IP rights to OS/2 in a way that they did not with DOS. From the beginning Windows was intended to compete with OS/2.

That is not what Microsoft was telling developers in the early days. I got to watch some Microsoft OS/2 developer training videos at work. They clearly told us that Windows was a temporary bridge to ease/facilitate the ultimate transition to OS/2.

which at the time was Win95

I am referring to things way before Win95. In the earliest days of Win 3, maybe even a little before the commercial release of Win 3.

You are correct about the OS dates. However, the key factor in the failure of OS/2 was IBM's decision to attempt to limit it to the 80286 chip and keep PC development from adopting 80386 chips and later. From the time of that decision, MS began to subvert development of OS/2 and plan to release its own OS based on the same ideas.

Windows "popularity" was helped along by aggressive MS marketing (!).
It was hard for a manufacturer not to pre-load Windows on their PC clone when MS contracts were per computer, whether it had Windows or not (example: pay MS $35 per computer loaded with Windows, or $7 for each PC you sold regardless of OS).
This practice was found illegal, but they kept doing it.

No, MS Windows 3.0 was genuinely popular with users. MS could play games to get it on the hard drive but it couldn't make users use it. People at the time generally agreed it was a great improvement over MS DOS, they overwhelmingly wanted a GUI based environment.

well, you're reiterating the IBM retro-history a little there. Microsoft had a huge role in developing the 32b 2.0, but the main problem was that IBM wanted to take it in the direction of huge, ramified mini/mainframe OSs. to my way of thinking, Linux is actually the proving counterexample of what was bad about OS/2 2.0: modularity and conceptual layering, but without the sclerosis of insisting that modules/layering be reflected in explicit, static APIs.

I loved how the retail Windows NT 4 CD shipped with Intel, MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC binaries. In grad school the architecture class was focusing on Alpha. Personally I was looking forward to CHRP systems (PowerPC) that would boot either Windows NT or Mac OS. Strange how both operating systems came to eventually exists on

Oh yes it did. I'm guessing you're just too young to remember. Thanks to massive os/2 tv campaigns, "normal" people suddenly wanted a computer, not just a console to play games on

I'm certainly not "too young to remember". I wish.

It was a different world then. There wasn't an internet to immediately find out that some marketing term was full of shit. If five percent of the population at the time could distinguish OS/2 from PS/2 I'd be shocked. The one thing people knew for certain is that IBM never went

The ps/2 inspired mostly laughter amongst the masses when they saw how it's price compared to a better clone. They only managed to sell them through under the table deals and having a non-standard length power cord that could be required in an RFQ.

For a while around the release of Warp v3 there was quite a few commercials. Better DOS then DOS, better Windows then Windows type of ads are what I remember. The local drugstore even had a bin of Warp CDs for $50 apiece.Unluckily they screwed up by claiming it would work decently with 4MBs of ram.

This guy created Citrix? Sounds like they'll need to build a whole new nastier level of hell to accommodate him. Citrix is one of the worst products ever made. Years later and it's still clearly nothing more than a nasty hack. Give me a Citrix box and I'll give you back a p0wned box. As for OS/2, well that just makes me sad.

I dunno about other Citrix products, but in my experience Xenapp blows. Overly long application launch times, force quitting an ornery app causes a server disconnect (thereby force quitting all its apps), clipboard gets out of sync between local device and the server (or between servers)...and (though I imagine it's just a setting in which case I can blame my company for the policy) auto-disconnect after about 35 minutes of inactivity, which likewise closes all served apps - no saving your work.

Sounds like your admins are incompetent, my users have none of those problems (ok app load times are a bit long at 35-50 seconds average for the first app on a silo). The advantage is that the apps just work and that they can be used from anywhere, we recently had a power outage at our HQ campus, instead of sitting around doing nothing everyone was able to go home and work from there.

Sometimes a hack is what you need, and it's the difference between being able to accomplish the goal, and not being able. But key is "years later." Now Citrix is irrelevant, but 20 years ago it let you do things which otherwise simply couldn't be done, and "p0wned" is largely a non-issue when talking about machines not connected to the Internet.

Let's say it's 1994 and you have a legacy MS-DOS application where porting it to Linux or whatever is

...and deserved to be successful. It never quite made it though...and it wasn't the Microsoft grassroots attacks that did it in, at least not directly. No, it was IBM and, more specifically, Lou Gerstner (the IBM CEO at the time), who publicly admitted that a few years later right before he retired. People have wondered for years about the WHY of that. Gerstner disdainfully referred to "desktop operating systems" as something that was detracting from IBM's image so perhaps the reason was simple corpor

That and probably the fact that they priced it outrageously. OS/2 2.0 was great, OS 2 3.0 even better then ultimately WARP but by then Windows and Windows NT were eroding the marketplace. I've spent years writing software for Windows and OS/2 and technically in some areas, OS/2 was much better and in others, not so much. IBM didn't really push the home consumer market but they were big in the corporate world where they still sold a lot of mid-range and mainframe systems. That and a lot of Token Ring cr

They did eventually lower the price. Redbox Warp 3 was being sold at London drugs (Canadian store) for $50 around '95. No manual but it was a refreshed build so supported IDE CDROMs and PPP and was much more likely to install. At least here it installed with minimal problems (had to do it again to get sound support). Currently the price is comparable to Windows boxed, I paid about $100 for the upgrade.

Oh yeah they cut the prices but also 3 and 4 were great Operating Systems. I still have a Version 4 Warp VM for a few apps I still keep around but as history tells us now, it was too late at least in the Consumer world for OS/2. Windows had already won because IBM ceded that market to them even though they were vulnerable with products like Windows ME and nasty anti-trust legal woes.

A long time ago they demonstrated they didn't really want to be in the commodity PC business, an industry that they had lead

But Citrix will probably last longer than the pyramids. It's impossible to ever kill an application that shitty. The only way to make it worse would be to run Lotus Notes on it. "Yeah, our corporate E-Mail system is Lotus Notes, run over Citrix..." *runs screaming from the building.*

I've actually have to do that, and even wrote it up at one point. I hate Lotus Notes, and not being designed for a multi-user environment you had to jump through hoops to get it to run right. Which unfortunately is where Citrix gets a lot of hate from. 'Admins' who don't know how to configure the environment, poor corporate policies, and forcing applications that shouldn't be run on it, to run on it. It's one of those platforms where people think 'well I have a hammer' and everything looks like a nail.

Citrix very much reminds me of using a desktop computer to connect via dialup to a 300bps machine. I'm using my fast, good computer as a dumb terminal to a slow crappy computer. Except that typically the manufacturer of the 300bps machine knew their interface was slow and would at least try to design the applications to make that as unobtrusive as possible.

I still have a boxed copy of OS\2 Warp, and probably an old enough computer somewhere around here to run it. As recently (recently... yea right) as 2000 I worked for a company that maintained old IBM mainframes running system 390. It was always fun to watch engineers crack one open only to see that there was an OS/2 workstation crammed in the middle. I think I just might take it for a spin as a tribute.

OS/2 is still used in many ATMs, although flavors of Windows are finally making major inroads in that market.

The place where I work once had a US Gov issued "black box" server on our network, doing data compare tasks that are of no major import but the agency responsible mandated that this work had to happen on their PC. So they supplied the box. It had all the IO blocked and the case was sprayed with a bed liner material to seal the seams and cracks. The only open connections were power, ethernet, VGA